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PhpBB 3.3.10

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Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#151

This goes on to prove that PHP is still relevant today. No matter how many new frameworks come up, we all know PHP anyways.

Eh, it doesn't matter that I know PHP. I don't want to use it and have barely touched it in the last few years, despite understanding many of its quirks. I'm still using WordPress at the moment but if I have to write PHP I might just quit using it. Such a simple question as whether something is passed by reference or by value shouldn't result in "This is a super interesting piece of information! Looks like it's true;…

> which versions of PHP support this lazy copy concept

The price of a dedicated cpu is down to under $4 /month in common web hosts. Meanwhile the IO and other performance also improved so much that you dont ever, ever notice such things. So nobody cares about that kind of stuff. That's overoptimization that nobody asked for.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#152

This goes on to prove that PHP is still relevant today. No matter how many new frameworks come up, we all know PHP anyways.

PHP has one great feature that makes it immortal. It's the only language that assumes that each code file is actually an HTML file. Try porting a simple PHP app to Ruby or Python and you'll see what a mess it becomes.

Its also why PHP and HTML mixed code templates are extremely fast for that reason. It was designed to be that way in order to solve the templating problem.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#153
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

every figgin web dev topic, popularity does not evidence merits. It's just a shitty language that existed at the right time when web technologies were booming. When more options become available, people stop choosing PHP. And please don't reply with js, like "but PHP is better than shit", that's a real high bar.

PHP was / (is?) hacky but there's no denying the very good culture of "getting stuff done" (and monetizing it) around it.

Precisely because PHP was always used and is still used in the front-line trenches of the web where business needs are always the #1 concern. Its used by small to medium businesses, professionals, individuals to run their businesses, communities and so on. There isn't any room for overoptimization, there isnt any room for wasting the non-existent VC money in developing questionable features, there isnt any room for any complicated setup that could cost time, which actually means money.

For that reason its also the most successful front of Open Source where an actual thriving ecosystem was able to develop on it through freemium business formats like in WordPress ecosystem. The plugin ecosystem of WordPress was estimated to have $1 bn volume a few years ago. And its quite streamlined in providing software and services at scale to the point of providing ordinary users and small businesses with features at price points they would not hesitate to pay. It does constitute an example for the rest of the Open Source world could follow or at least learn from.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#154
post #89
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly makes PHP 8 shit?

But what makes it good? It's fast, it uses low memory, it has a great package manager, it has great backwards compatibility, it has a huge ecosystem of libraries, it is easily integrated with other technology, it scales, it has an easier learning curve, it's easy to hire for (although it has been getting harder).

> (although it has been getting harder)

Its likely getting harder because PHP has developed its own specializations in the form of frameworks. Laravel is one, WordPress has become another. People look for 'Laravel developer', not 'PHP developer'. Or, 'Wocoomerce developer' -> not 'WordPress plugin developer', not 'WordPress developer', the least, not 'PHP developer'.

Specializing in one of such emerging specialization fields pays !much more! than just developing on PHP, so it will become more difficult to find PHP developers into the future. Especially the WordPress enterprise ecosystem sucks a lot of WordPress/PHP developers out of the contracting market into high-paid, long-term jobs.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#155

HN, the most popular forum for hackers. Long-live forum software :)

until you try to comment/post on a few week old post. HN is not a forum

One thing that HN has in common with forums though, is that threads stay around for years . And that's a good thing, as there can be a lot of useful information even in old threads.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#156
post #9

Every time I see hype about Mastodon and the fediverse I miss the phpBB days. There was something special about the interlocking network of forums that didn't need to "federate" in any formal capacity. We just joined communities we liked and formed overlapping networks like normal people do and always have done. No one at the time felt any need to try to accommodate the whole world in one venue. As someone who never…

It seems that by formalizing / integrating things at the technical layer we lost something.

I do miss those days, I still feel different when I interact with these old websites.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#157
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent so many years on SA and Homebrewtalk and they were both such rich communities. Discord is nice and all (and seems to be where things are going) but there's something overwhelming about chat that was really cozy about forums. (everything2 was incredible back when it was active and I really wish there was something like that again too)

Problem with discord is that it is still just a chat, with forums a newbie has a lot of threads to go through, lots of specific content to consume.

Discord is attempting to have something more like forums[1], but as am not a heavy Discord user I haven't tried it myself.

I used to run a phpBB forum and there was something about being an admin of a forum where people you didn't know in real life came to talk. The fact that Discord distorts the term 'server' to mean 'a channel managed by us' irks me.

1 - https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-...

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#158
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of the forums I used to use died this way. The site owners eventually got tired of having to janny the site daily to fight an endless wave of attacks. It's all moved to reddit and discord these days.

Janny?

Janitors (shortened to "janny") are a part of 4chan's moderation team.

Seems like the slang has bled out to incorporate all types of volunteer moderators.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#159

I jumped ship from phpbb as their develoment stalled. Then I switched to Simple Machines Forum, then development if that project stalled. Then I moved to VanillaForums, then development kind of slowed there. Now I am considering Discourse or NodeBB, which both are in an entirely different league of technology and sleekness. But now none of my friends wants to hang put in forums anymore. Oh well.

Open source Vanilla seems to not be doing well: https://open.vanillaforums.com/discussion/39204/where-do-we-.... It's a shame. I thought it had a nice UI: mobile-friendly, not very flashy, around 300K per page (less if assets are cached), rendered on the server. I wanted to migrate my FluxBB forum to Vanilla, since FluxBB is effectively discontinued in favor of Flarum. If I migrate my forum now, it will probably be to Flarum. https://www.unitedbsd.com/ runs it, and I seem to like the experience of browsing it more than Discourse forums (edit: but I still prefer paginated forums without infinite scrolling). It also helps that Flarum has lower system requirements than Discourse. The forum migration tool https://github.com/linc/nitro-porter targets both Vanilla and Flarum, though I haven't actually attempted a migration with it, so I don't know how useful it really is.

I rejected NodeBB because MongoDB is no longer developed under a free license. I'll list some other forum software I have considered in case you find it useful: Fossil Forums (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/forum.wiki), nimforum (https://github.com/nim-lang/nimforum), Talkyard (https://github.com/debiki/talkyard), Misago (https://github.com/rafalp/Misago), FlaskBB (https://github.com/flaskbb/flaskbb). All of these have less momentum behind them than Flarum. Most are lightweight. I found it very appropriate that nimforum's name is inconsistently capitalized. :-) I am still kind of amazed that Fossil has integrated a forum and a chatroom. During my research I also found an interesting fork of SMF: https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte.

Re: PhpBB 3.3.10

#160
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people who hate PHP, forgot how painful it was to develop server side apps before PHP. I think one of the greatest legacy of PHP was brining "Serverless" hosting to the masses, where you only focus on the "upload" of the code, and you didn't need an ISS or Linux expert to deploy your projects. Yeah, PHP had a weird teenage phase, but even JS and Python still have a lot of weird things too (specially JS). But…

Rails is gone, aside from a few use cases there is always a better alternative.

Someone should notify all the websites using Rails that their framework apparently no longer exists.
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